Automatically Add Trial or Deposition Exhibit Stamps to PDFs

Rick Borstein has a great blog that every serious litigation support professional should check out. See: http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/ . Included on the blog is an action for Adobe Acrobat X which allows you to add exhibit stickers automatically to multiple PDFs. If you don't have an application like Trial Director which will allow you to add exhibit stickers to document images, you should try taking advantage of Rick's approach. However it has its shortcomings. If you add exhibits stickers with the action they come out looking like Figure 1 below.

No paralegal, or attorney, will accept an exhibit sticker that is just a long bright blue bar. This does not look like the stickers used for trial and deposition exhibits for generations. Borstein's action also has a serious flaw - at least as it operates in Acrobat XI. Unchecking the option to add in the page number prevents the action from automatically incrementing the exhibit number for each pdf which is being processed. No one would want a page number on an exhibit sticker anyway. Here's a description of how to get around these limitations. Follow the steps below and review the instructional video.

1. Using Google Image Search find an image of a blank exhibit sticker like the one found here .

Any lawyer will recognize the format of this sticker as one commonly used by court clerks and reporters.

2. In Adobe Acrobat XI, go to Tools . . . Action Wizard . . . Create Action.

3. in the Choose tools to add menu, select Pages . . .Add Watermark.

4. Uncheck prompt user, and then click on Specify Settings.

5. Click on the radial button for File and then browse to the sticker image that you saved.

6. Set the position vertically zero inches from the bottom and horizontally zero inches from the right.

7. Set the absolute scale to 35%.

8. Choose only the first page of each PDF in the Page Range Options [see the upper right of the dialog box].

9. Click OK and then save the new action with a distinctive name.

10. The new action will appear in the Action Wizard Tools menu. Click and then choose the PDFs you want to process.

11. Press start and then save each PDF as it is processed.

12. Go to Borstein's blog posting at http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2010/12/automatically-add-exhibit-numbers-with-a-free-acrobat-x-action/ and download the link to Document_Numbering_Action.pdf. Open this PDF, and in the attachments menu on the left save the .sequ action file named Document Numbering. Double click on this file in folder you saved it to, and it will be added to Acrobat. See the instructions in the Document_Numbering_Action.pdf.

13. Click on Document Numbering in the Action Wizard meun and add the same files to be processsed.

14. In the dialog box that appears set the position 0.5 from the right and 0.2 from the bottom. Then set the Label Type to Exhibit 1 - Line, or Exhibit 2 - LIne. Make the background transparent. Do NOT uncheck the Include Page # box. Doing so will cause the action to malfunction. Make sure the initial value is set to 1, or whatever your first exhibit number should be. Delete any entries in the Prefix box for the pages, and then enter a very high number of blank spaces in this box. Set the page range from 1 to 1.

15. Finally click Apply Label to run the action. Click for each PDF that you are processing.

16. At this stage the exhibit numbers preceded by the word 'Exhibit' will appear on the first page in the center of each sticker.

17. Improve the appearance of the sticker by adding in a deponent or party's name. Go to Tools. . . Pages. . . Add Header & Footer. It helps if you have one of these files already open, so you know how to position the text which will be added.

18, Adjust the margin settings until the text added in the Right Footer box is positioned correctly.

19. Apply the new footer to the same group of PDFs - see the option at the bottom of the dialog box.

20. When Processing choose the target folder as the "The Same Folder Selected at Start", uncheck 'Open When Finished", pick "Keep Original File Names", and check "Overwrite existing files".

21. You'll have PDFs with exhibit stickers that look like those used at depositions. Don't worry about the number of steps listed here. The overall process is actually very simple and you can run through it quickly once it's familiar to you.

FOLLOW LITIGATION SUPPORT TIP OF THE NIGHT AT: http://soshea0.wix.com/litsupporttips This is the tip for the night of August 31, 2015